Читать книгу The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics - Группа авторов - Страница 28

A common criticism leveled at dignity and repeated by its adversaries is that it cannot be objectively and rationally explained and that it is, therefore, indemonstrable.

There is no doubt that dignity is the postulate of a value, not an empirical fact observable by the senses. It does not resemble, for example, an identifiable object, or a logical deduction, or a juridical law. Its essence is of the moral realities, like bravery, decency, compassion, which are not apprehended by scientific reasoning but which are recognized by feelings, even before they can be defined. Whatever dignity may be is learnt, not in the logical definition of scholarly treatises, but in the direct intuition of its essence, which is revealed by a specific example.

The law requires that something should be done and, if it is not obeyed, the law imposes it coactively. But in the realm of morality, unlike that of legality, it would be futile to order someone to be virtuous: you cannot tell people to be good; you invite them to be good. Every example of virtue includes an invitation to do the same and to make it generalized. And naturally this is also true of the practical acts of dignity. But it is not true of that innate and original dignity that every human being possesses by the mere fact of being. One thing is what a person does, which can be worthy or unworthy (pragmatism) and another is what he or she is (ontology). And, as I have said before, the democratic concept of original, ontological dignity remains intact in spite of reiterated unworthy praxis. This dignity is not a fact, not even a moral fact, but a postulate, an attribution that, with the passage of time, has widened its subjective basis. This growth does not come about through an invitation, as in the case of virtue, but through scandal.

The witness of an action, which had been morally invisible in the past, surprises himself on contemplating with sorrow what he suddenly perceives to be an act of violation. At that moment, the witness has implicitly applied to the victim, and the group to whom the victim belongs, a dignity that tradition had obstinately refused to afford him. Novels in the nineteenth century, for example, familiarized readers of the time with the injustices suffered by abused women, abandoned children, impoverished masses, debtor prisoners, and exploited workers. These novels showed readers, for the first time, that sectors of the population who historically suffered discrimination possessed the same dignity as the privileged by highlighting the scandal produced by such wretched situations. In the majority of cases, dignity is recognized by its absence, when the respect due is missing, because it is then that unquestionable truths are clearly evident. And the feeling of scandal is not usually limited to benevolent compassion but sooner or later unleashes an active movement of social reform aimed at bringing to an end those situations of indignity that are now judged to be intolerable.

Egalitarian dignity has been ranked as sacrosanct, and yet it is no secret that, in fact, it continues to be violated a thousand times a day. However, there is an important difference between the violations of the past and those of today: the dignity of women, children, workers, or the poor may continue to be violated, but today no one can do so without degrading themselves. For centuries, a woman’s body, for example, could be constantly violated without punishment and even without reproach, because that action, given one name or another, or none, had become invisible in the normalcy of total masculine domination. Today, many women continue, unfortunately, to suffer violations, but now the violator can only carry out his repugnant act by degrading himself morally while creating revulsion around him and in himself too, if he is not totally corrupted.

The revulsion produced by indignity shows humanity the path towards moral progress.